It is often desirable within a business or other planning environment to generate information regarding demand, available supply, selling price, or other data concerning a product or other item. Data for products may often be dependent in some manner on data for other hierarchically related products. For example, demand for a product with multiple components may drive the demand for a particular one of those components. Similarly, demand for products in a particular geographic region may drive the demand for the products in a particular territory in the region. Because of these hierarchical dependencies, the data concerning various products or other items may be stored hierarchically in data storage or derived in a hierarchical fashion. Furthermore, the data may be stored at a storage location associated with multiple dimensions, such as a product dimension (the storage location being associated with a particular product or product component), a geography dimension (the storage location being associated with a particular geographical area), and a time dimension (the storage location being associated with a particular time or time period).
It is often desirable to update product data by forecasting demand values or other appropriate values for a particular product or group of products. As an example, using the current and/or past demand values associated with a particular product in a particular state, the demand for the product in that state at a time in the future may be forecasted. However, it may not be feasible or accurate to forecast demand values for the product in a particular region of the state or to forecast demand values for the product in the entire country in which the state is included. Instead, the demand value for the product in the particular state may be used to determine other hierarchically related demand values using allocation techniques. For example, the forecasted demand value may be allocated by aggregating it with demand values for the product in other states in the country to determine a demand value for the product in the entire country. Alternatively, the demand value may be allocated by disaggregating it to determine a demand value for the product in each of the regions of the state. However, many current allocation methods do not provide a sufficiently accurate allocation of forecasted values and thus negatively affect demand planning, supply planning, or other planning based on the allocated values.